It was an odd ending to a strange campaign. Just a day after being endorsed by the largest newspaper in South Carolina, Jon Huntsman announced he was withdrawing from the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Less than a week before, Huntsman elatedly told a crowd of "ladies and gentlemen" backing his candidacy that his third place showing in New Hampshire was a "ticket to ride" to South Carolina's pivotal primary. If he had a ticket to ride, wags joked, he don't care.

In reality, few observers thought Huntsman's nearly 17% of the vote in New Hampshire – roughly six percentage points behind Ron Paul – would help him much in South Carolina or beyond. Even after the best showing of his campaign, Huntsman remained mired in the single digits in most states and national polls of Republican voters.

Huntsman was a popular former governor of Utah. He had served President George HW Bush as ambassador to Singapore and deputy US trade representative. Yet, the most recent line in his resume was, in the eyes of many Republicans, disqualifying: ambassador to China under President Barack Obama.

In theory, serving under Obama gave Huntsman a unique vantage point from which to challenge him. It also created a narrative for his candidacy that proved attractive to Huntsman chief strategist, and former John McCain adviser, John Weaver: "Country first."

Many conservatives didn't see working for Obama, even in a traditionally nonpartisan role, as putting country above party. They saw it as an act of disloyalty, or worse, putting power before principle. That wasn't the last time Huntsman misread the GOP electorate: he clearly took the view, popular in the aftermath of Obama's election, that the GOP needed to tone down its rhetoric to regain the White House. Huntsman failed to predict that Democratic government would nudge the country back to the right on its own, giving rise to the Tea Party.

Huntsman was the subject of several flattering profiles in the mainstream media that portrayed him as a voice of sanity that would deliver his party from rightwing crazies. In his own campaign announcement, he emphasised civility, which many conservatives regard as a moderate Republican code word for "surrender".

Although it is possible this positioning was an accident, Huntsman's connection to Weaver gave credence to the idea that this was a deliberate campaign strategy. Weaver ran McCain's 2000 campaign, in which the candidate attacked large parts of the Republican base, most notably denouncing two prominent religious right leaders as "agents of intolerance". McCain didn't win the nomination that year, in no small part because such rhetoric doomed him in closed primaries where independents couldn't vote.

So, Huntsman casually tweeted about his belief in evolution and climate change. "Call me crazy," he quipped. Many conservatives felt that Huntsman was actually calling them crazy. Many of his campaign's obituaries will read, in effect, "Weaver defeats Huntsman." (Weaver rejects this interpretation of events.) But instead of having a former Utah governor's standing to distance himself from the base, as an ex-Obama appointee, Huntsman actually had a greater obligation to demonstrate his conservative bona fides.

Those conservative credentials were not insubstantial. As a pro-life governor, he signed a law that would immediately ban abortion in Utah if Roe v Wade was ever overturned. He was a second amendment supporter. He cut taxes. And in his campaign, he was the only Republican presidential candidate to enthusiastically support House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan's controversial plan to transform Medicare and rein in entitlement spending.

There was one other area where Huntsman tried to distinguish himself from the rest of the GOP field: foreign policy. He opposed the Libya war, called for a US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and courageously spoke out against torture. But he also refused to call the Iraq war a mistake and said repeatedly he was open to another preventive war against Iran. Huntsman's attempt to be a more moderate critic of foreign adventurism than Paul ended up just muddying the waters.

The Huntsman candidacy did start an interesting debate about whether conservatives prioritised red-state identity politics over policy proposals in choosing their candidates. The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf dubbed it "frivolity" that Huntsman's jokes and tweets were considered more important than his free-market policies.

If Mitt Romney – the man Huntsman is now endorsing – goes down in flames, it is possible this smart candidate will get another chance. Huntsman would become a much smarter candidate if he heeded a tweet, of all things, from political consultant Jon Henke: